Index: All Games | Saints Row (2006) | Saints Row 2 | Saints Row: The Third | Saints Row IV | Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell | Agents of Mayhem | Saints Row (2022)
- Base-Breaking Character:
- While Gat has a sizable fanbase and is seen as a badass, several people feel that he's put on too high a podium, especially after two straight games where he's hyped as a Memetic Badass who's more feared than the Player Character.
- Kinzie has her followers and many people are fine with her being Gat's partner for the expansion, whereas other fans are upset that Shaundi (who has known the Boss and Gat much longer) and Asha (who is an experienced MI6 agent with comparatively little screentime) got passed over for the role of female lead.
- Complete Monster: Satan himself is a cruel and controlling Fallen Angel who rules Hell with an iron fist. He takes pride in administrating the eternal torment of souls, allowing souls privileges only if they benefit him. Satan constantly plans on mounting an invasion of heaven to get revenge on God, taking to recruiting souls for his army, forced or otherwise. He plans on getting leverage over a general by forcing his daughter Jezebel to marry them, and sets his sights on the leader of the Saints who he kidnaps. Satan disregards Jezebel as a possession, and even threatens to break her neck at one point. When Johnny Gat and Kinzie Kensington go to rescue their friend, Satan forcibly makes a deal with Johnny to let The Boss go, so long as Johnny becomes his new general.
- Crosses the Line Twice: The Shawarma has Shakespeare conduct a performance of the live burial, exhumation, and re-burial of Shogo Akuji. Considering that’s the way he died, it becomes utterly hilarious. Even better, critics loved it!
- Funny Moments:
- With Kinzie being controllable in Gat Out of Hell there's a gold mine for potential hilarity while she rampages through the city.
"I'm starting to understand why the Boss likes violence so much."- While we are talking about Gat Out of Hell, let's talk about Vlad the Impalers torture. How is he being tortured exactly? By being forced to sit in a nursery-like room at gunpoint, having to listen to The Wheels on the Bus over and over again. As if that wasn't enough, there is also a demon DJ rocking out to the song like he is in a nightclub.
- Another one from Gat Out of Hell. Satan and his daughter are introduced in an over-the-top, five minutes long, Disney-style musical number, in which both of our protagonists get to participate as well. Awesome. Then his daughter escapes and meets with Johnny Gat and Kinzie. They ask who the hell she is, and she prepares to do yet another musical number....... but is suddenly interrupted by Gat who states in a matter-of-factual tone "We're not doing this again". The look of disappointment on her face is both hilarious and heartbreaking at once.
- Game-Breaker: Step 1: Buy Diamond Sting for 100,000 Wages. Step 2: Fully upgrade it. Step 3: ??? (piss off some demons, maybe) Step 4: PROFIT. If you feel like breaking the game even further just bring this bad boy to a few survival missions. The battlefield will be absolutely covered in money by the time the fight is over.
- You can make collecting that money even easier by upgrading the Vacuum Stomp power to also collect Wages and Health pickups and getting the Stomp Area upgrades as well!
- The summoning power, particularly when fully upgraded. Its ultimate level gives the player a hulking demon that can easily take on boss level enemies at full health and cause massive damage even after it has taken some hits. Even better, it's completely unaffected by anti-power grenades if it's already out before the grenade goes off, giving the player a near unstoppable ally at all times. Oh, and its recharge rate? After about 3 seconds you can get a fresh one with completely full health. Used correctly you can effortlessly walk through the entire game without firing a single bullet.
- Genius Bonus: In the ending cutscene the Boss asks Jezebel if she can "rock The Narrator from Joseph". Jezebel says yes with a scoff, amusing since the Boss is talking about The Narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and the irony of the Devil's daughter knowing a musical about the Bible.
- Goddamned Bats: Spires aren't in of themselves very powerful, but getting hit knocks you out of the air, curtailing your ability to fly until you get rid of them. Imps can be this as well, since they die in a single hit but they're so quick they can be hard to hit and their favorite attack is to grab you and start gnawing which can rapidly drain your HP if you get attacked by several at once.
- Heartwarming Moments:
- After defeating Satan, Johnny meets God, who tells him that after Zinyak destroyed Earth, the denizens of Hell outnumbered those in heaven and Satan just needed the President to lead them. Johnny then asks why God thinks he couldn’t do that, only to informed that God thinks Johnny wouldn’t - Aisha’s in heaven.
- In one of the five endings Johnny asks God to let him in to Heaven so that he may finally reunite with Aisha. Ignoring the fact that the Saints will never see him again, seeing Aisha walking out from the pearly gates to greet Johnny and the two embracing cements Johnny's happy ending.
- And in the secret 100% Completion ending, all of the protagonists get to invoke various kinds of Earn Your Happy Ending — especially when Viola convinces God to start allowing annual conferences between Heaven and Hell, which implicitly allows Johnny to reunite with Aisha without having to be separated from the Saints for all of eternity. You can even see Lin and Carlos.
- In the find a new home ending there are two smaller heartwarmings. The first is Gat's note that they want to see Aisha but still have the living they need to care for which paints Gat in a mature, caring light for all he's done. Second is the planet god finds for them is perfect except for warlike inhabitants. Johnny, for his selfless wish, got what he wanted: the ability to be as violent as he wants and a good cause to fight for.
- Kinzie's interactions with the DeWynter twins, particularly when Kiki, who's somewhat reluctant to trust Kinzie and dislikes her referring to Viola as a sister, finally embraces her at the end of their loyalty mission.
- If you play as Gat instead of Kinzie, he'll tell Viola how much Kinzie misses her, and Viola is touched.
- Kinzie's excited whooping and giggling when she flies is downright adorable. Even with all that's going on and that's she's in Hell, Kinzie's just having a blast zooming around with wings.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: An adult-themed work set in a colorful and vibrant version of hell featuring a humorous and quirky cast of sinners and demons, tons of Black Comedy and crude jokes and the adorably cheerful princess of hell herself singing a freaking musical number?! Surely, such an outlandish and crazy concept could only ever exist in the wild and wacky world of the Saints Row series... and even if it didn't there's no way anyone would ever take such a weird idea seriously... right?
- It's Short, So It Sucks!: Granted, even the in-game dialogue pokes fun at this. Still, there are very few story missions and you can open the way to the final boss in around two to five hours, depending on how sidetracked you get. Even if you're playing on Hardcore difficulty.
- Player Punch: Several beloved old friends return... as residents of Hell. For some, like Kiki and Viola it isn't so bad as they were able to acquire a human form and manage to hold down a respectable business in their afterlife. Others like Tobias, Troy, and Luz who aren't so lucky end up as husks that the player has to torture to shave years off of their sentence in hell. At the very least, it's mentioned that Tobias is doing it to see his wife Laura again who went to Heaven.
- Play the Game, Skip the Story: The story makes less sense than the game it's supposed to expand on, let alone being presented not as nicely. Well, we could make a discount on that because of the musical number, but while some thought it was hilarious, some keep skipping it due to the (intentionally) ridiculous length for a cutscene, some people just didn't like corny musicals, or it can be rewatched later. Because hey, who needs the story, when you can actually fly instead of hovering through buildings! Not to mention that Volition didn't reuse Steelport once again! And there's a lot of gimmicky weapons for you to toy around with!
- Tear Jerker: The musical number has some moments like...
- Jezebel wanting to be free from the iron grip of her abusive father, Satan. The fact that he slaps her around during his sequence and pretty much tells her she's nothing more than a possession to him only makes it hurt more.
- In Johnny Gat's number, you can really get the feeling that he's beginning to doubt if he's even capable of saving the Boss from Satan's clutches. Luckily he has Kinzie there to snap him out of it.
- Johnny, in both the Heaven and the Hell endings, is no longer with the living so he's effectively, for all intents and purposes, dead. Again. One only imagines what the Saints (especially Shaundi) must've felt knowing that they would never see Johnny ever again...
- That One Achievement: "Top Gunner" requires you to use a Blast to Shoot the Bullet of a Spire's missile. Hope you have good timing! "Let's Bounce" and "Gnarly Wave" are quite annoying as well, as the former requires you to touch five vehicles in a row without touching the ground in the Torment Fraud activity, and for the latter you must car surf on a Comet before it explodes, which can be frustrating due to the AI's behavior.
- That One Sidequest: The "Salvation" and "Hellblazin'" activities are a major pain if you're not good with the flight mechanics.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: While it can probably be excused due to the fact the game is an Expansion Pack, after you completely take over Downtown, a storybook page shows that many previous Saints Row antagonists, such as Kazuo, Shogo, William Sharp, and Killbane, have teamed up. You never once get to fight any of them, and the conflict is resolved with barely any note after 100% takeover.
- An ever bigger Anti-Climax goes through the series as a whole: many oldschool fans of Saints Row felt like the Dex Revenge diversion is definitely not how you end a feud which started in Saints Row 2 and then was left uncovered for two games straight. The fact that completing the diversion seven times nets you an (honestly) awesome gun doesn't help. The fact that the unreleased Saints Row: Money Shot had more convincing circumstances of Dex being murdered doesn't help either.
- Given that Gat and Boss are more or less equally badass/dangerous, it wouldn't have taken much rewriting to have Gat being kidnapped with the boss being playable. This way the customization element of the previous games could have been kept. Doesn't help that the whole customization thing from appearance to outfit are in game but Dummied Out.
- Due to how well-liked the parodic musical number was, some are disappointed that the entire story didn't have more than one song.
- Generally the whole "the Saints in Hell" plotline would have felt more fitting than the base games "aliens trap the Saints in a simulation" Along with the above mentioned "switching Gat to be Satans prisoner" which would have avoided the retcon of IV saying Zinyak kidnapped Gat.
